Videobrasil Online Launches 'Confinamentos' Exhibition on Mass Incarceration

The online exhibition 'Confinamentos' launches May 10 on the Videobrasil Online platform, curated by researcher and writer Juliana Borges. Featuring 14 videos produced from the late 1980s to the present, the show critically examines mass incarceration in Brazil, linking it to criminal policy, racism, colonial history, the civil-military dictatorship, police violence, and human rights. Borges expands the concept of confinement beyond prisons to include systemic, consumerist, and social media constraints, as well as imposed standards of sexuality and bodily function. The exhibition includes five international productions from South Africa, Argentina, Australia, the United States, and Russia. Borges's central video testimony, nearly 45 minutes long, questions why Brazil, with the world's third-largest prison population of nearly 800,000, relies so heavily on incarceration. She argues that criminal policy is designed to maintain inequalities and privileges for specific groups, rooted in colonialism and slavery. The exhibition is the fifth project on the Videobrasil Online platform, launched in September 2020 by the Associação Cultural Videobrasil. Director Solange Farkas emphasizes the platform's role in preserving a significant video archive from the Global South. Borges notes the current pandemic moment makes these questions about confinement and freedom particularly urgent.